Code Coven's community supports diversity, including my voice as an older game maker https://codecoven.co/introduction-to-game-making-by-code-coven-2022/
As a game writer and science-fiction world-builder, my intentions in taking Game Making by Code Coven using Unity were to expand my game developer network and get comfortable with Unity so that I could collaborate with my programming colleagues. What happened in the course was much more! I got back into my 2-D and 3-D art skills, got over my trepidation about C# programming, and realized that with Unity I can integrate my gameplay and storytelling ideas.
Our course included game makers from around the world. Each of us brought our own experiences and perspective to the five class projects that we completed. Step by step we were given projects that added to our skill set and created portfolio ready pieces.
“Step by step we were given projects that added to our skill set and created portfolio ready pieces.”
My first project shown above was "Patisserie at Night." It's fixed camera, static scene that allowed us to explore 3-D modeling including lighting, textures, reflectivity, and transparency. Unity's tools are so much faster and agile than the work that I did long ago in SketchUp and 3-D Studio Max. I loved making bakery treats. And I loved the freedom of making game pieces that didn't have to be realistic--in a game bakery, the treats can be weird!
In our second project, we added physics and gravity to make Rube Goldberg machines. I loved playing with color and light, and capturing elements that have e x p l o d e d!
For our third project we were given an almost complete 2-D platformer game and asked to change out assets with other found assets. The ones in my game below came from: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/characters/sunny-land-103349 We also added preliminary C# programming such as "camera follow" to track with the player, and "destroy" on player contact with loot or enemies.
For our fourth project we could do anything that we wanted. I chose to keep it simple and take the lessons that I learned in the third project, only do it better, and... with assets that I created.
This is when I found the animated sprite editor & pixel art tool: https://www.aseprite.org/ There I could create pixel based assets. I dove in and spent the rest of the course playing inside Aseprite, creating fairies, magic berries, forest floor platforms, giant leaves, and on and on. I had a great time exploring a world that I had never known existed before. And I learned to animate!
The fifth and final project was the best. We got to work on teams to take the skills that we learned so far and now add the magic of team communication, scheduling, scoping, and pipeline processes. I had a wonderful partner https://twitter.com/foxfyre22 Our complementary skills and interests made a solid game dev team.
Our three word random theme generated “Tiny+Word+Hospital” made us laugh. We immediately set to work on a game for misspelled words that need to be taken to the hospital to be fixed.
To give the project a sense of tiny-ness, we made our word ambulance traverse the maze of a sewer cover that I photographed in my neighborhood, adding an AR ambience to our game.
This was a truly amazing eight-week class.
In just eight weeks we were each supported to create five distinct portfolio pieces all while expanding our game developer community and increasing our ability to communicate with our colleagues.
Thank you so much Code Coven https://codecoven.co/ and to Unity https://unity.com/!